Alamy Measures Stats June 2008

Third full month on Alamy and these are some stats from my measures view of Alamy. Views were down this month, but that was expected as I tightened up my keywords and removed some images which were sub-standard

Proportion of searches for:

1 word = 13% , average of 21.45 pages viewed
2 words = 30% , average of 14.09 pages viewed
3 words = 33% , average of 16.21 pages viewed
4 words = 19% , average of 16.02 pages viewed
5+ words = 4% , average of 5.36 pages viewed

Average number of my pictures viewed matching query: 1.83
Total average CTR for searches in which my images appeared: 1.13%
My CTR: 1.35%

Proportion of searches for:

5 letter words 17.52%
3 letter words 16.85%
4 letter words 13.75%
6 letter words 13.30%
7 letter words 12.64%
8 letter words 7.98%
2 letter words 5.32%
9 letter words 5.32%
10 letter words 4.21%
11 letter words 1.33%
15 letter words 0.89%
12 letter words 0.44%
13 letter words 0.44%

Most popular words (top 5 in each position):

First word: edinburgh, amsterdam, UK, recycling, plastic
Second word: and, bin, UK, of, crowd
Third word: UK, england, and, table, festival
Fourth word: mountain, mile, tantrum, and, books

These stats seem to show that the buyers tend to search with the obvious word first (wow...I mean, how earth-shattering is that statement...it's worth coming back to my blog for that exclusive insight) By rights you could just put this one word in the keywords and get very good Alamy rank but at the expense of rarely appearing in searches. The best approach appears to be combinations of no more than four keywords - but most of my pictures are of something so this is easy. The surprise, that "and" keeps coming up. Should I start putting "and" in my keywords on every image? As it happens, "UK" turns up on most of my "UK" ones anyway.